| follow us on |  |
 |
 |
 |
I recently attended a healthcare marketing conference in Asheville and it was perhaps no surprise that social media led the agenda. Social media is dominating marketing agendas in every industry segment. Everyone wants to take advantage of the social media revolution, but they aren’t sure how to get started. So they go straight for the tactics, creating a Facebook page or Twitter account and call it a day.
Like a lot of people, I’ve become a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. His talent for telling stories in page-turner style makes it great fun to take in all kinds of disparate information he pulls together. One of my favorite anecdotes from his book Blink is how the Getty Museum paid millions for an unknown statue alleged to date from the sixth century B.C.
It’s a rare thing when the world actually INVITES advertisers into their homes. On Super Sunday, families and friends gather around the TV in the hopes of seeing something hilarious, outrageous and entertaining. My house was no exception.
Pepsi turned some heads when it announced recently that after 23 years of advertising at the Super Bowl, it had decided in 2010 to instead give away over $20 million in a social media blitz called The Pepsi Refresh Project (http://www.refresheverything.com), debuting in 2010.
Forget survival of the fittest. If you want to stay relevant (and in business) and succeed in our industry, you’ve got to be creative. I’m not talking runofthemill creative; I’m talking about being bravely creative in ways never imagined, from big, bold idea generation to content delivery strategies. You’ve got to be willing to break away from conventional ways of thinking, doing and communicating to discovering and applying “new” things. The “new normal” will require new approaches, new ways to segment, new channels, new terminology, new forms of collaboration, new organizational models and of course new media, which by the way isn’t so new anymore.
If you'd like to receive our thoughts on creativity, media trends, public relations tools, interactive developments and other subjects, click here to sign up.
